Hawker Built a Mach 2.5 Fighter, Then Refused to Fly It
Share this story By the summer of 1958 the experimental shop at Hawker’s Kingston works held something very close to a complete aeroplane. The wing was built. The fuselage frames were joined. The undercarriage had been tested, the systems rigged, the wind-tunnel...
Su-34 Production: Russia Has Built 212, Lost at Least 43
Share this story At an air festival at Mochishche aerodrome outside Novosibirsk in early August, someone photographed a Su-34 that had not been painted yet. Bare factory grey primer, straight out of the shop next door. It is a mundane picture that answers a question...
Cessna 172 Crash at Montgomery Field Kills Two in San Diego
Share this story A Cessna 172 Skyhawk crashed and burned on a runway at Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport in San Diego on Monday evening. Two people on board were killed. San Diego police logged the crash at about 17:20 local time on 7 September. It was the Labor Day...
ANA Flight 58: The Midair That Killed 162 Over Shizukuishi
Share this story A student fighter pilot four weeks into his posting, with twenty-one hours on type, was holding formation on his instructor at 28,000 feet over northern Japan. He saw the airliner about two seconds before it hit him, in his four o’clock. His...
Aeroflot 366: The Tu-124 That Ditched in the Neva
Share this story On 21 August 1963 a Tupolev Tu-124 ran out of fuel over the middle of Leningrad, glided for fourteen seconds, cleared a bridge, and landed on the River Neva without killing anybody. A tug that happened to be towing a raft of timber past the spot cast...
GE Aerospace Wins DIU Contract for Mach 5 Derecho Testbed
Share this story The hard part of hypersonics is not going fast. It is going fast often enough to learn anything. Flight tests above Mach 5 are rare, enormously expensive and frequently one-shot. A programme might get a handful of attempts across a decade, and if two...
USAF Wants a $10 Million Reaper Replacement by 2029
Share this story The United States Air Force has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reapers since the Iran war began. That is roughly a quarter of the fleet, gone, in about a year. The service has now decided that the answer is not a better Reaper. It is a cheaper one — and...
Air India A320neo Lost All Three Hydraulic Systems at 36,000 Feet
Share this story The Airbus A320 has three hydraulic systems, and they are separate on purpose. Green, blue and yellow. Three reservoirs, three pressure sources, no fluid shared between them. The architecture exists so that no single failure can take away the flight...
Kamov Ka-22 Vintokryl: The Soviet Record Breaker That Killed Nine
Share this story On 24 November 1961, a machine that looked like somebody had bolted two helicopters to the wingtips of a transport aircraft lifted 16.4 tonnes to two and a half kilometres, set six world records in one flight, and landed thirty minutes later with its...
HAP-alpha: DLR’s 138-Kilogram Solar Aircraft Takes Off
Share this story An aircraft with three quarters the wingspan of an Airbus A320 and the weight of two adults took off from a runway in Saxony-Anhalt on 2 September, flew a wide, careful circuit for seventy minutes, and landed again. It never went higher than 180...
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